programs we think riveted the nation; the Army-McCarthy hearings drew a mere ten-per-cent audience share. Of all the famous public-affairs broadcasts of the fifties, only the Kefauver hearings were truly popular-they got a thirty- two-per-cent share-and that was be- cause they were about organized crime. As the television audience grew larger and took in people from small towns and the middle of the country, it became ob- vious that Americans wanted predict- able, familiar entertainment, featuring, as Baughman astutely observes, stock situations and stars who had unusually expressive faces that lent themselves to cartoonish mugging shown in closeup. The results were often terrific, but never uplifting. Forces on the supply side of pro- grammingwere in accord with forces on the demand side. Live television, which required performers to memorize an hour's worth of lines at a time and risk being photographed unflatteringly, was popular with practically nobody but Pat Weaver, and Los Angeles-rich in soundstages and talent-rather than N ew York was the natural home for television production. In "NBC: Amer- icà s N etwork" (California; $60), a col- lection of scholarly articles, Douglas Gomery, of the University of Maryland's Library of American Broadcasting, ar- gues that the real architect of television production was neither Weaver nor Paley but the powerful agent-producer Lew Wasserman, ofM.C.A., who figured out how to put together filmed series in a way that would be financially advanta- geous to the stars, the networks, and, of course, himsel and then went over Wea- ver's head and dealt with David Sarnoff I t quickly became clear that successful series were the economic engine of net- work television. On no subject is Baughman more slyly iconoclastic than television news. The main reason it came into existence, he suggests, is that network executives, acutely aware that the United States was the only Western nation to have a pre- dominantly private and commercial sys- tem of television, wanted to protect 9 their berth. Broadcasters were legally re- quired to operate in the "public inter- 8 est," and they took the requirement ee:: seriously, albeit more as a meaning- ful threat than as a sacred duty. That's where news came in. In effect, it was a means to the end of being permitted to prosper in the entertainment business. In this respect, Pat Weaver's eclipse mayac- tually have been good for news. Weaver, according to Baughman, had little in- terest in journalism; "quality," for him, meant culture. After Weaver left net- work television, orchestra concerts lost t..,ì" r ; . W. t\ J.{ i' . ' -r.. . . . I.\ \.' , , - ... i?: \ 'f . t , . 'J . I ' '\'.rl'\ W.\' 'k l"" ;:, '. . ' ing revenue. NBC got rid of the Blue net- work, which its new owners renamed ABC. Rather than build on the network's strength in news, executives quickly cut back ABC's journalistic commitment in order to make it more profitable. In the fifties, when ABC was trying to build it- self up into a real competitor to NBC and CBS as a television network, it barely . , Ir News, like "culture, " was away flr networks to show regard flr the public interest. their champion, and news had an exclu- sive claim to demonstrating the networks' devotion to the public interest. Of course, some broadcasters were genuinely inter- ested in journalism. But nobody should imagine that broadcasters courageously launched aggressive news divisions in the face of government hostility; if Baugh- man has it right, broadcasters became journalistic because the government forced them to. ABC came into being because the F.C.C., back in 1941, ordered NBC to divest itself of one of the two national radio networks that it owned, the Red and the Blue. The Red was the more valuable of the two, because it carried less news and other public-affairs programming, and so had a bigger audience and more advertis- had a news division. The networks' deci- sion to cover the quadrennial national po- litical-party conventions, beginning in 1948, was, Baughman implies, motivated mainly by the thought that a heavily reg- ulated industry would do well to make it- self a big presence at a gathering of federal officials. The networks' commitment to documentary units, beginning in the late fifties, coincided with the aftermath of the quiz-show scandals, when it was nec- essary, once again, to convince public officials that there was no need to tinker with the American model of broadcast- ing. Even the advent of televised debates between Presidential candidates, in 1960, was, to Baughman, just "one more bone tossed to the chattering classes" by the networks' ever-fearful internal-reputation THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 30,2007 81